Realistic Load Modeling for Efficient Consumption Management Using Real-Time Simulation and Power Hardware-in-the-Loop

By empowering consumers and enabling them as active players in the power and energy sector, demand flexibility requires more precise and sophisticated load modeling. In this paper, a laboratory testbed was designed and implemented for surveying the behavior of laboratory loads in different network conditions by using real-time simulation. Power hardware-in-the-loop was used to validate the load models by testing various technical network conditions. Then, in the emulation phase, the real-time simulator controlled a power amplifier and different laboratory equipment to provide a realistic testbed for validating the load models under different voltage and frequency conditions. In the case study, the power amplifier was utilized to supply a resistive load to emulate several consumer load modeling. Through the obtained results, the errors for each load level and the set of all load levels were calculated and compared. Furthermore, a fixed consumption level was considered. The frequency was changed to survey the behavior of the load during the grid's instabilities. In the end, a set of mathematical equations were proposed to calculate power consumption with respect to the actual voltage and frequency variations.

Automated summary

By empowering consumers and enabling them as active players, demand flexibility requires more precise and sophisticated load modeling. A laboratory testbed was designed and implemented to survey the behavior of loads in different network conditions. Power hardware-in-the-loop was used to validate the load models under various technical network conditions, and a realistic testbed was provided to validate the load models under different voltage and frequency conditions.